Love Revisited
New Frameworks for a Better World Book One
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Despite all the pretending and faking in the name of love perpetuated across our planet, and despite the intellectuals and cynics who protest that love is never anything but an illusion, I believe real love must exist, and here’s why. If you watch children, it seems they all feel an intense desire and need for love — for getting lots of attention, approval, and permissions, secure boundaries and appropriate reprimands, closeness and encouragement, care and concern, understanding and special consideration, getting enough of what they want, and sharing smiles and laughter with their parents or guardians. Moreover, when a child feels well cared for but doesn’t sense that the spirit of love is behind it, they often seem to know it, or later realize it, and feel stung by it. How could it be that children universally want and need and keenly sense something as fundamental as love if it doesn’t exist? Additionally, the large number of adults seeking psychotherapy or counseling because they felt unloved as a child and still feel affected by it attests to the existence and power of love. Even adults who claim they don’t believe in love appear to suffer from love’s absence. I believe true love is a living energy, a spirit – the highest of all spirits, the greatest good – and that the inner experience of love, romantic or familial or otherwise, is the natural reaction to profound goodness perceived. If you experience real love, your reaction to who/whatever you love circulates throughout your being – spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. For some, a physical reaction is what you perceive first, while for others, it’s a feeling in the air, or maybe an awareness that a person you’d been friends with might be a potential mate. No matter how it begins, love, if it’s real, will soon reverberate throughout all parts of you. Of course, people sometimes keep their feelings a secret. Many of them deny to themselves that their feelings could be anything but a weird experience, or that perhaps they've been tricked, and they quickly try to talk themselves out of their feelings. But if you’re open to the experience and choose to let it happen, you’ll feel the love flowing into your awareness and express it in whatever ways come naturally to you, depending on your personality and the type of relationship you have. If it’s a thing you love, you’ll want it; if it’s a place you love, you’ll want to be there; if it’s a beautiful concept you love, you’ll want to think about it and probably share it; if it’s a person, pet, or plant you love, you’ll want to get close in an appropriate way. What’s appropriate usually depends on social roles. People in the role of parents naturally experience and express love to their children differently than children express love to their parents. The love of friends, siblings, romantic partners, ordinary citizens who suddenly find they can help a stranger, and of people loving and enjoying their favorite food are each expressed differently, and for the most part it would be inappropriate to mix them up. Yet some common threads run through all types of love. Amidst all these differences in types and expressions of love, one common thread is that the person or thing you love strikes you as good in a deep or important or basic way. Food is profound because it’s necessary for our survival. Colors are profound in that they have meanings that reflect something about ourselves. So many of the mundane experiences we have contain deeper meaning to us subconsciously. That’s what I mean by the experience of love being the natural reaction to profound goodness perceived – and the greater and more profound the goodness perceived, the deeper and stronger the love that’s experienced. That’s why some loves immediately feel stronger than others. Another common thread is that your love grows, stays steady, diminishes, or dies in proportion to the amount and depth of goodness you perceive in them over time – and your perceptions can change. Where love leads to a personal love relationship, a common thread is the mutual fulfillment of personal needs according to your roles. How does a great love die? The more time you spend with the person you love, the more you see both good and bad in them, in terms of your own needs met and not met, and in terms of your perceptions of good and bad ways they interact with other people and situations. This is most obvious in children’s feelings of love toward their parents, since a child’s perceptions of the mother and father, and their corresponding feelings of love for them, change significantly as they grow. But it’s also true in other types of love relationships. Friends may part ways because of different directions in life, but their good feelings for one another don’t have to change unless they begin to perceive behavior or attitudes they don’t like. Similarly, if you eat some food you love, and then later it results in food poisoning, you may stop perceiving great goodness in that food and stop loving it. And if you absolutely love a vacation spot but, after years of enjoyment there, you witness a horrific murder in that location, you might stop loving it as much. In romantic love, couples often long for the earliest days of their relationship, when their love felt strongest. Many songs have been written about the singer’s regret for a love that faded over time, and these singers often ask why – how did this happen? The answer is simple, though: after time passes, we perceive more and more. If much of the goodness you originally perceived in your beloved turns out to have been an illusion, or if the goodness you first saw is there but a lot of bad stuff has turned up, too, your love will likely diminish in proportion to your adjusted perceptions of their fundamental goodness.
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About the Book
Love Revisited: New Frameworks for a Better World contains a series of refreshing new ways of looking at many age-old issues surrounding love. These new frameworks challenge such long-held beliefs as our shared cultural understanding of romance – as if it’s mostly for women – and our cultural insistence that love is either real or it’s not – as if it can’t be real in some ways. Designed to broaden your awareness, Love Revisited: New Frameworks for a Better World identifies love’s essence, elements, expressions, types, oppositions, interactions within multiple contexts, its complicated relationship to attraction, and its spiritual purpose of promoting growth whether love is lost or gained. At the same time, you’ll learn about what unifies all versions of love. Once you recognize love’s applications to individuals, couples, groups, and nations, you may even start to see new possibilities for yourself and for society.
About the Author
Like many of you, I’m a lifelong student of love. I’m far from perfect at it, but through an unusual set of circumstances and life experiences, I’ve been able to understand things about love that many people don’t seem to know, and to change my life for the better in the process. In this book, my aim is to share my perspective with the hope that others will benefit from it, too. I grew up in metropolitan Chicago, and so far, I’ve lived in the U.S. Midwest all my life. Just like many of you, I occasionally had psychic perceptions as a child. There were a few times when I saw visions. On one occasion I saw an ominous vision in the sky and knew something very bad was about to happen, though I couldn’t say what. Then something very bad did happen. A couple of different times I looked into someone’s eyes and saw a vision. There were also times when, upon seeing someone and hearing their voice for the first time, I felt I’d known them before. And sometimes when I had a funny feeling that something specific was going to happen, it did. Of course, these are among the types of experiences that a lot of kids may have, and at least here in the U.S., most of us are taught to laugh and dismiss them as meaningless. But one afternoon when I was about ten, I was sitting at the piano in our living room, drifting off into a daydream, when suddenly something strange happened that I couldn’t possibly dismiss, nor could I tell anyone about it since I guessed they would think I was nuts. Now at that age, I had never heard of past lives, and if I’d heard the word reincarnation, I didn’t understand what it meant. It wasn’t in my grade school vocabulary or my religious upbringing. What happened is that I began to feel my body growing larger until I felt like I was a tall, grown man. I sat with the feeling, trying to determine whether I was still daydreaming, and I realized I was fully alert and keenly aware. I knew then what it felt like to be in a different body and still be me. There wasn’t a mirror in front of me, but as I looked down my nose, I saw that I had a long, large nose. I also felt my hands on the keyboard and realized I was a musical composer. After what seemed like a full minute or so, I felt my body slowly begin to shrink back to my ten-year-old self. After that, I sat there for quite a while, absorbing the experience and trying to decide what to do about it. I thought if it was real, I should be able to write music, so I put my hands on some keys and composed a little song. It was a short piece, but I understood how to do it and saw that it was very easy. When I was eleven, I had an even more dramatic experience: a near-death experience. I wasn’t clinically dead, but I was comatose in critical condition for about five days after I sustained a brain concussion in a car accident. While here on Earth, my body was unconscious, I was completely conscious somewhere else. At first, I found myself standing in a little room much like an elevator with three other “people.” There was a grown man who looked tall and wore a white gown or robe and seemed to be my Guardian Angel; my sister Susie, who had recently turned seven; and another tall man in a white gown or robe who seemed to be her Guardian Angel. I felt completely safe. The elevator-type door opened, and we all moved forward into a large room with a ceiling so high that when I looked up, all I saw was bright light. The room looked something like a lobby, with a large front desk and just a few chairs on one side. I stayed near the elevator door with my Guardian Angel, and Susie and her Guardian Angel moved over toward one of the walls where it looked like they were communicating. Then Susie telepathed me, “I have to go.” We waved to each other. We were both calm, and she looked beautiful. She didn’t appear to have been injured. She looked fine. Then she and her Guardian Angel walked toward a hallway and down the hall. The hall was long, unlit, and empty, but in the distance I could see a brightly lit space where other beings seemed to be happily moving about. My Guardian Angel sat me down in something like a chair and spoke to me clearly in English. He asked me if I wanted to go back to my life on Earth, and I said, “No.” I felt very sure about that. Rather than take my word as final, though, he proceeded to tell me about things that would happen in my life if I went back, as if to encourage me. Then he asked me again if I wanted to return, and again I said “No.” Next, I saw several beings file into the back of the room in a darker, shaded area and sit down on what seemed like chairs or benches, as if they were sitting in a jury box facing me. They seemed like grownups, but I couldn’t see their faces distinctly. I wondered what was happening, and then I realized they were conferring telepathically to try to generate ideas to help my Guardian Angel convince me to agree to return to my body and finish my current life on Earth. My Guardian Angel continued to inform me of things that would happen, things that could happen, and how they (the angels) would help me if I returned to my life. His voice was very distinctive, but always gentle and calming. Still, I kept feeling “NO.” I’d had some pretty harsh experiences as a child, and I just didn’t want to go through what I knew was coming in life. Finally, while back at the hospital, my parents were forced to consider how long they could keep me on life support due to insurance limits, my Guardian Angel told me that my life was important, and that if I went back to it, toward the end of my life I would be able to help a lot of people. The desire to do something great, something as big as helping a lot of people, was my Achilles’ Heel, so I reluctantly said “Okay.” My Guardian Angel offered me some parting advice and told me I wouldn’t remember anything that had happened. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed with some permanent brain damage, broken bones, multiple scars on my face, arms, and legs, and long-term partial amnesia, blocked from remembering anything that had ever happened to me or anything I’d ever done or said in my life up to that time. At this point, you might be wondering: wasn’t that near-death experience just a dream? I don’t see how it could have been, though, because ever since then, my Guardian Angel still talks to me sometimes—not when I’m asleep, dreaming, but in the daytime, when I’m wide awake. It’s not a voice in my head. It sounds like he is standing next to me, although when I look around there’s no one there, and nobody around me seems to hear it. I always recognize his very distinctive and calming voice, and he always gives me helpful instructions or guidance that applies to my immediate situation, always related to my spiritual path of love. For all you doubters, there are historical precedents. Back in ancient Greece, Socrates talked about his “Daemon,” a voice he heard that gave him advice when nobody around him heard it. His Daemon gave him instructions that he always followed. Unlike the state religion, which involved gods and goddesses, Socrates thought of his Daemon as the voice of the one “god,” or “the divine” (1967, 1972: The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 7, p. 482. New York, Macmillan, Inc.). Whether Socrates heard this voice in his head or from an invisible entity next to him is unknown, but either way, he identified it as coming from a spiritual source. Today a man named Anthony William hears the voice of a spirit that he reports sounds like a man standing right next to him. That voice gives him useful, testable information on food and its effects on the body along with other spiritual information. Anthony William is known as the “Medical Medium,” not because he’s a doctor or healthcare professional, but because, as a spiritual medium, he can tell us what the spirit says about all sorts of diseases, especially what really causes them and how to use food and supplements and spiritual practices